The lifelong attraction of the sea and bodies of water to Virginia Woolf forms the basis for a turning point in her fictional representation of the ocean throughout the course of her life which culminates with The Waves. This chapter traces her ambition to represent the sea within symbolic discourse without imposing human meaning upon it through overt metaphor. Instead, her focus is on developing an appropriate form that maintains a tension between human and nonhuman worlds, while critiquing the deadliness of the dominant discourses in the former over the liberation from repression experienced by the material existence of the latter.